Inspiration Series: Calvin and Hobbes

Before I begin, I would like to take note that the domain for this website has changed to penguin-capers.com. If your bookmarks are still penguinspalooza.com, please update them. Thanks.

I’m not always too swift at writing blog posts, or what to write about. I like to voice my opinion way too much, but perhaps this is the time to quit doing that most of the time since this is a comic blog, after all. This week will begin (hopefully) a series of comics and books(other than instructional, I’ve already done my recommends in previous posts) that have inspired me to draw comics and continue making what seems to be a foolish pursuit in the comics and webcomics world.

What inspired me to start drawing comics? A brief history:

One day I saw my sister had bought/brought a steno notebook home and she started drawing a comic strip with a mouse called “Bubble’s Troubles” in it. Naturally, being the “little” sister, I wanted to copy everything she did. I started drawing a similar comic with a mouse called “Leo”. Hmm, a lack of creativity there(copying isn’t so bad to begin drawing). After awhile though, she had given up on this endeavor, but I continued. After a few years of drawing “Leo”, I started another comic from simple church doodles. It became “Fat Dog”, which ran for about 5 years. Afterwards, a friend of mine in high school helped me develop a few characters for a semi-currently running strip I named “Friend to Friend”. Since then, I’ve had a few ideas for comics, but only a few had turned out halfway decent, Penguin Capers being one of them.

I’d alway been enamored with comic books, but never was too interested in keeping a collection of my own. It was expensive for a kid, after all. I did eventually start a collection of syndicated comic strips, starting with “Calvin and Hobbes”:

I loved the way Bill Watterson made Calvin’s imagination run wild—that Calvin had an imaginary friend everybody else saw as not being real. I loved this so much I began to copy this stuffed-tiger to real-tiger a little bit in the “Fat Dog” strip with the characters Toh-Goh and Penny. After awhile it was obvious that I couldn’t go on like that, so Penny became the lovable character she is in “Friend to Friend”.

Watterson’s art style I loved as well as all the characters. No matter how annoying Calvin got, you just had to love him since he and his imagination made the comic worth reading. I was a little disappointed that this strip ended after 10 years, but as any artist knows you can become so emotionally attached to your art you don’t want to let go sometimes(Watterson’s saying no to companies wanting to make lots of money of his hard work).